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abeppu | 9 days ago

I don't speak Mandarin but is this not an issue of style rather than the language itself? English can be courtly or poetic or abstruse but that's a matter of the speaker making a bunch of choices. I can't help but think of "Yes Minister" and Humphrey Appleby working quite skillfully to communicate in a way that ensured he would not be understood. Do Mandarin speakers not also have such a range of choices to be clear or not?

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RestartKernel|9 days ago

Maybe it's a matter of code switching? I've read that some Japanese teams prefer English for practical reasons, since a shared second language prevents anyone from getting bogged down in formalities. That is not to say Japanese is unable to be formulated with just as much precision.